Gimp won't recognize my pen sensitivity

I figured I'd need this place in the future, so i went ahead and made an account, here's what my guest request said, sorry if it shows up twice or something

"So I have a Dell/windows vista and a simple Bamboo tablet i got for 80 or so bucks at Best Buy and I downloaded Gimp because I can't have photoshop.
I've looked and looked for solutions, hopefully someone here can help, because I am so tired of this mess.

I got Gimp sped up, but now It won't recognize the pressure sensitivity on my tablet, can anyone help?"

1. if you open your control panel you will see "tablet pc settings" and you should see "wacom tablet properties".

2. Gimp has some "brush dynamics", in the tool window, whenyou select the pencil or brush tool.

Click to expand...

oh yeah, forgot to mention those dynamics - I tested them out, and velocity i know works, but it ignores pressure across the 4 options
Thanks for the lead on the Control Panel, there were several menues there, although none had any options about pressure sensitivity or whatnot

When I first installed Gimp and played around a bit, I'm pretty sure i remembered it working, it just seems to have stopped after I made it run faster (giving it more ram) because my brush was 2 seconds slower than my hand...

Is there maybe something in that menu area that I could have accidentally touched?

Once this is done you go to Edit > Preferences > Input Devices > Configure Extended Input Devices in Gimp and set the devices pointer, pen, eraser to the Screen mode (the names and number of your devices may differ, if you have another tablet).
My Wacom tablet is working very well now!

I know this is an old post, but I found it via Google and had something to add (so I joined just to make the following statement):

You have to have the default "Pen Mode" set in the control panel for Gimp to recognize the tablet. I don't know if this is specific to a version of driver or Gimp, so your mileage may vary. But it is what I had to do after following the above very thoughtful and intelligent advice

Hey I need help. My Tablet shows up in GIMP when painting but GIMP doesn't recognise the pressure. Also it doesn't show up in the Extended Input Devices. My tablet is AIPTEK Media Tablet 14000U and this is becoming quite a big problem! Any help would be good!
Thanks,
Gus

Here's how you get your tablet to work on GIMP:
Open GIMP
On the upper toolbar, click EDIT -> PREFERENCES
On the lefthand menu, click INPUT DEVICES
Click CONFIGURE EXTENDED INPUT DEVICES
On the lefthand menu, click PEN and change its mode to SCREEN
Click SAVE in the lower righthand corner
Click OK in the lower righthand corner
Restart GIMP

You can now customize your own Dynamics or use the premade ones . Enjoy your new pen pressure!

Gimp 2.8 relies on a version of GTK+ that doesn't support pen pressure, and other pen tablet functions. You need to wait until 3.0 or go back to 2.6, which supports these features. I don't have the exact details on hand, but that's the basic idea.